W.G. Sebald

By W.G. SeballiterTranslated by Jo Catling From the renowned author of Austerlitz (named a Top 10 Book of the 21st Century by the New York Times) comes the first English translation of his extraordinary essays on the Austrian writers who shaped his life and work. Silent Catastrophes brings together the two books W.G. Sebald wrote on the Austrian writers who meant so much to him: The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in Austria in 1985 and 1991. As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighboring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Nazi Germany, meant that concepts such as “home/land,” “borderland” and “exile” occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald’s own. Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth, and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude. This is an essential new edition from “a writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity” (The Guardian). Hardcover544 pagesRandom House, 20255.5 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9781400067725Literature

Silent Catastrophes: Essays

By W.G. SebaldTranslated by Anthea Bell Winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award, The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize Translator Anthea Bell—Recipient of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Outstanding Translation from German into English“Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno’s dictum that after it, there can be no art.”—Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review“Sebald’s final novel; his masterpiece, and one of the supreme works of art of our time.”—John Banville, The GuardianThis tenth anniversary edition of W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece includes a new Introduction by acclaimed critic James Wood. Austerlitz is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Paperback320 pagesModern Library, 2011Originally published in 20015.3 x 0.7 x 8 inchesISBN 9780812982619Historical Fiction

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Silent Catastrophes: Essays

Austerlitz

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W.G. Sebald